RealGM 50 Highest Peaks Project Thread

[colts18]

If we do the nomination process, I prefer having 3-5 candidates, that way we can seriously debate each candidate. If there isn't enough discussion, we can make a rule that we won't start a new thread until the thread reaches 100 posts.

[bastillon]

If we do the nomination process, I prefer having 3-5 candidates, that way we can seriously debate each candidate. If there isn't enough discussion, we can make a rule that we won't start a new thread until the thread reaches 100 posts.

+1

[Doctor MJ]

well, it seems like there's been some major clashing with Lebron's peak and he is the only current player on this list. I was curious to see where he'd finish since both sides have presented strong arguments on him.

It seemed like he could have finished as high as third, but he's dropping down the ranks and this may be because his career has not finished yet. We don't have the full picture logic (on James) that I've seen posters use for other players in the project.

So, because of the small voting panel and the currency of James' career, I'm not sure that an accurate placement can be made. We'll just have to wait a few years i guess?

LeBron's clearly controversial, and these things just happen. It's important for everyone to understand that they'll happen with nominations or without. The reason to have nominations is just to have a bit more of a vetting process before a player gets enshrined.

[Doctor MJ]

If we do the nomination process, I prefer having 3-5 candidates, that way we can seriously debate each candidate. If there isn't enough discussion, we can make a rule that we won't start a new thread until the thread reaches 100 posts.

If we do nominations, this is about how it would look.

Incidentally, if we were to switch over to that system, I don't take it as a given that we'd start from scratch just so that's clear. Starting over is an option, but it's a touch nuclear for my taste.

Your 100 post threshold idea is an interesting one. I'll keep that in mind.

[Doctor MJ]

Re-posting a proposed solution from the other thread:

[
Solution: 1 vote per round. Or your only allowed to change vote within 1 hour of making a vote.

[Doctor MJ]

Responding to colts' solution, 2 issues:

1) The proposed solution won't stop strategizing. It'll just make those serious about keeping their least favorite from winning delay their actual votes.

2) The whole 1 hour deadline, I really don't know if that's something I want to police.

I'm kind of hoping that we can have some gentlemen's agreements here. Right now, there's absolutely nothing ethically wrong with voting for your #9 pick to stop #10 from getting in. My hope would be that if we simply said "You can only switch to one of your top 2/3/etc picks" most people would follow it.

[Doctor MJ]

Another proposal off the top of my head:

You don't vote for 1 guy, you vote for your #1 & your #2. You can switch them in the thread for strategy reasons, but you can't throw anybody else in the mix without explaining why you've had your mind changed.

When your #1 gets voted in, your #2 has to be your #1 in the next thread unless, again, you explain what made you change your mind.

I kind of like this because in addition to it being a "solution", it also means encouraging people to trumpet whenever they've had their mind changed.

On the other hand, it might be too complicated to work.

[MacGill]

May be too much to monitor as well but what about assigning a maximum number of times you can switch your vote throughout the project, re: 3 times or something along those lines?

[ElGee]

As for the discussion, tbh I don't like it at all because I'm literally 100% out on the In/Out injury +/- (I made a long post saying why here viewtopic.php?f=344&t=1165142&start=30), I honestly think it means less than JordansBulls' HCA theory, that's how little I trust the numbers. But everyone else in the project is down with trying to use that method to evaluating players that's OK I guess?

Yes, because it's incredibly meaningful to know that a team was a 0 SRS team for 40 games and a 5 SRS team for another 40 games by adding a player. I don't know how this isn't relevant information to someone. Of course, this is exactly why I post this information -- because people rarely ever know it and it's useful.

You have to judge the information based on the sample, and you have to weigh the information based on variance in performance (once you get out near 20 games this becomes small). You citing Rerisen's "theory" about teams adjusting has little evidence to support it (why wouldn't teams just switch up their strategies constantly then??), and the idea of teams over-exerting themselves also doesn't have much evidence for the average team because some fall apart without a player and some don't. It's just selective memory. Your point about an error of +/- 2 rendering the data useless is also strange given (a) the error rates of APM/RAPM data and (2) error rates are based on confidence intervals which still have a "most likely" value.

Either way, it seems crazy to me to NOT want to know that information. It's like saying "don't tell me the shooting percentages of teams because they aren't 100% indicative of anything."

[drza]

Duncan beating Bird isn't because an "anyone but Lebron" attitude. I'm reading through the thread and colts voted Lebron but said he'd go Duncan after, drza is saying "one of the bigs or Magic", JordansBulls says he has Magic 4 Duncan 5 and Bird 8, and JosephPaul's original vote was for Magic before switching it to Duncan. So there's a trend of people jumping off Magic, which means they're choosing between the 3 players in contention - and I don't see anything wrong with that, if it's close a pseudo run-off of these voters is exactly what should be happening. It would be an issue if Bird voters were switching to Duncan to keep Lebron off the list but that's not happening.

No, it's more complicated than that, and the proof is right in what you mentioned:

Those are 3 people who have jumped off the Magic bandwagon in a vote which at the time had LeBron in the lead with 4 votes. They let the fact that Duncan got two quick votes persuade them that he was in the runoff, and now those 3 Magic converts make up the majority of the Duncan contingency.

Had they simply stuck to their guns, Magic would be ahead of Duncan, no worse than one vote behind LeBron, and very much in the "runoff". They didn't, so in essence what this group of 5 has done is side for the preference of 2 over the preference of the other 3. This is the problem with strategic voting in a nutshell, and why people need to be careful using it or they will actually make their preferences have less weight than if they didn't try to strategize at all.

Seems like this rightly goes in this discussion, so I'll reply here. Since I'm one of the posters that you refer to that didn't "stick to my guns" on Magic, it seems as though I should weigh in. The main problem that I have is that you're way off base, at least as far as I'm concerned. You're entire premise is that I wanted Magic to win, but I decided to vote for Duncan purely to keep LeBron out. And that doing this is short-changing Magic and Bird. But if you go back to the #3 thread you'll find:

So while I'm not convinced that '86 Larry Bird would have had much more success against the Magic than '09 LeBron...I think that 2003 Duncan would have. Or mid-90s Hakeem. Or mid-90s D-Rob. Or '03-04 KG. Or '70s Kareem. Or '67 Wilt. I think that any of those elite bigs could have kept the Cavs as an upper seed in '09 (though perhaps with fewer than 66 wins), but that they would have been much tougher outs in the playoffs. And I definitely think that such a team could have taken out those '09 Magic.

Now this takes us into more esoteric directions, somewhat analogous to the "portability" discussion...in fact, maybe it's because of those talks that my mind is moving in this direction. But it also ties hand-and-hand with the question of box score stats and their utility that I'm currently having with Colts...could a wing have essentially perfect box score stats (as LeBron essentially did in the '09 playoffs) and he still be not as valuable to a championship squad as a similar caliber big with excellent (but often poorly measured) defensive impact whose box score stats might not be as impressive?

And then, in the #5 thread I said:

Speaking as someone who'd love to vote Magic here but is finding himself more and more impressed by the bigs when I look at peak...what is it that makes you so certain that Magic/Bird/LeBron peaked higher than both of them (Hakeem and Duncan)?

In the #4 thread I stated that my preferences for the next votes would be "either one of the other bigs (Hakeem/Kareem/KG/Duncan) or Magic...maybe Bird"

I've also got a post in this project somewhere, which I can't find (and it's frustrating me), where I break down how players like Walton, Garnett and Duncan can make their teammates better on both offense AND defense because of their defense, passing, and unselfishness and how I find that in general to be much more impressive than volume scoring wings or even just offensive anchors, because it's so portable and scalable.

Literally every vote that I've made thus far has been from the lists I was establishing at least as far back as the #2 or #3 threads, where I started pointing out that the big men were impressing me more than the perimeter players when I looked at single-season peaks. The only perimeter player that I was putting on their level was Magic and maybe Bird, but I have a post stating that I have Magic over Bird and then the above post questioning whether Magic should be over the other super-elite bigs.

Bottom line: if you don't like the people I'm voting for that's one thing...engage me in debate. I've already had a few with Colts18, I've tried to engage Therealbigthree about the bigs vs the wings, I've even tried to engage you a time or two. But it's odd to see my name included as 1/3 of the group of voters that are so disturbing the vote in the project that people want to start it over...when in fact I've been ultra consistent about both the type and the names of the players that were impressing me, long before LeBron got 4 votes in the #7 thread.

[ElGee]

As someone still kind of trying to figure out how Kareem got voted in (I now know how he got voted in, and I didn't know because of a neat selectivity feature this site allows), I have very little issue with the vote. If we aren't going to make it more complex or use a real IRV, I'm OK w what's been happening here.

The issue, as Doc has said, is people not understanding when to switch and when to stick to their guns. It's confusing because the panel is small and we don't have anything close to majorities, we have pluralities. I could have switched this last round so my vote would "count," but I'm never going to switch a vote I don't feel passionately about. Meanwhile, I left, came back, and my vote counted. Big time. In general, if...

-my guy has 1 or 2 votes, it's the 11th hour, there are two major contenders. One I have next, the other I have 10 spots away. Switching makes sense here (this is exercising my pseudo instant runoff vote.)
-my guy has 1 or 2 votes, it's the 11th hour (or not), there are three contenders, none of whom I have separated by much of anything. I want my vote to "count" but I don't see a reason to change my original vote here bc what exactly will it accomplish? How would this be a pseudo runoff -- I have no strong opinion and I don't really "know" who to vote for because another change or two might change the playing field again.

So right now I'm not seeing the need for many systemic changes (especially nominations again -- what's the point in those again?) as long as people don't over think the "runoff" part of their vote.

[Doctor MJ]

Duncan beating Bird isn't because an "anyone but Lebron" attitude. I'm reading through the thread and colts voted Lebron but said he'd go Duncan after, drza is saying "one of the bigs or Magic", JordansBulls says he has Magic 4 Duncan 5 and Bird 8, and JosephPaul's original vote was for Magic before switching it to Duncan. So there's a trend of people jumping off Magic, which means they're choosing between the 3 players in contention - and I don't see anything wrong with that, if it's close a pseudo run-off of these voters is exactly what should be happening. It would be an issue if Bird voters were switching to Duncan to keep Lebron off the list but that's not happening.

No, it's more complicated than that, and the proof is right in what you mentioned:

Those are 3 people who have jumped off the Magic bandwagon in a vote which at the time had LeBron in the lead with 4 votes. They let the fact that Duncan got two quick votes persuade them that he was in the runoff, and now those 3 Magic converts make up the majority of the Duncan contingency.

Had they simply stuck to their guns, Magic would be ahead of Duncan, no worse than one vote behind LeBron, and very much in the "runoff". They didn't, so in essence what this group of 5 has done is side for the preference of 2 over the preference of the other 3. This is the problem with strategic voting in a nutshell, and why people need to be careful using it or they will actually make their preferences have less weight than if they didn't try to strategize at all.

Seems like this rightly goes in this discussion, so I'll reply here. Since I'm one of the posters that you refer to that didn't "stick to my guns" on Magic, it seems as though I should weigh in. The main problem that I have is that you're way off base, at least as far as I'm concerned. You're entire premise is that I wanted Magic to win, but I decided to vote for Duncan purely to keep LeBron out. And that doing this is short-changing Magic and Bird. But if you go back to the #3 thread you'll find:

So while I'm not convinced that '86 Larry Bird would have had much more success against the Magic than '09 LeBron...I think that 2003 Duncan would have. Or mid-90s Hakeem. Or mid-90s D-Rob. Or '03-04 KG. Or '70s Kareem. Or '67 Wilt. I think that any of those elite bigs could have kept the Cavs as an upper seed in '09 (though perhaps with fewer than 66 wins), but that they would have been much tougher outs in the playoffs. And I definitely think that such a team could have taken out those '09 Magic.

Now this takes us into more esoteric directions, somewhat analogous to the "portability" discussion...in fact, maybe it's because of those talks that my mind is moving in this direction. But it also ties hand-and-hand with the question of box score stats and their utility that I'm currently having with Colts...could a wing have essentially perfect box score stats (as LeBron essentially did in the '09 playoffs) and he still be not as valuable to a championship squad as a similar caliber big with excellent (but often poorly measured) defensive impact whose box score stats might not be as impressive?

And then, in the #5 thread I said:

Speaking as someone who'd love to vote Magic here but is finding himself more and more impressed by the bigs when I look at peak...what is it that makes you so certain that Magic/Bird/LeBron peaked higher than both of them (Hakeem and Duncan)?

In the #4 thread I stated that my preferences for the next votes would be "either one of the other bigs (Hakeem/Kareem/KG/Duncan) or Magic...maybe Bird"

I've also got a post in this project somewhere, which I can't find (and it's frustrating me), where I break down how players like Walton, Garnett and Duncan can make their teammates better on both offense AND defense because of their defense, passing, and unselfishness and how I find that in general to be much more impressive than volume scoring wings or even just offensive anchors, because it's so portable and scalable.

Literally every vote that I've made thus far has been from the lists I was establishing at least as far back as the #2 or #3 threads, where I started pointing out that the big men were impressing me more than the perimeter players when I looked at single-season peaks. The only perimeter player that I was putting on their level was Magic and maybe Bird, but I have a post stating that I have Magic over Bird and then the above post questioning whether Magic should be over the other super-elite bigs.

I stand corrected drza. I might have just made a mistake. Here's what I'll admit to though:

One of the posters said they'd vote for "Magic or one of the bigs" and then proceeded to vote for Duncan, who had the voting edge at that point. If that was you I'll admit to some extrapolation that other people's vote influenced.

Bottom line: if you don't like the people I'm voting for that's one thing...engage me in debate. I've already had a few with Colts18, I've tried to engage Therealbigthree about the bigs vs the wings, I've even tried to engage you a time or two. But it's odd to see my name included as 1/3 of the group of voters that are so disturbing the vote in the project that people want to start it over...when in fact I've been ultra consistent about both the type and the names of the players that were impressing me, long before LeBron got 4 votes in the #7 thread.

I do owe you personally an apology drza but I really cannot imagine that I'm not seeing a real trend here. Do you disagree with that?

I'm engaging in debate all over the place in this project, and if I haven't done it with you, then that's just because there's a lot of stuff going on. But suffice to say, yes I'm doing that primary debate generally, and yes I'm also focused on trying to keep everyone on track.

Had I seen brilliant pro-Duncan arguments that were followed by others saying, "Wow, I'm convinced", etc, I wouldn't have been concerned at all. But here's what I saw:

1. The same guy on pace to finish 2nd for at least the 3rd thread in a row.
2. A guy winning who hadn't been a major threat before and who people hadn't seemed to be converted on.
3. Not one but 2 other guys (Bird & Magic) who always beat out the guy who was about to win, losing to him without much discussion happening.
4. This surprising soon-to-be-winner getting a couple quick early votes and then other people switching over to him without argument.

All of this while knowing from previous experience that an issue we always seem to have is people getting carried away with strategic voting, which always has pretty much those exact same symptoms.

Basically, I went into this project expecting to have to deal with this issue at some point, and there it was, so I raised awareness as much as I could.

What concerns me then isn't actually that I see this, but that I'm seeing it so dang early. I mean in the last Top 100 project, we didn't hit this point until the 40s, and by that point I don't think anyone was concerned that it would significantly damage the project. Here though it's not even clear if we made it out of the Top 5 without it playing a huge factor. Much bigger deal.

Now like I say, I know nothing's life or death here, but we're still early on in the project that if we hit a snag, I think it makes sense for us all look at what's happening and see if there's something we might change going forward.

[lorak]

re: voting system

Panel is small so why not send votes by PM to Doc? That would eliminate "strategical" change definitively.

[Doctor MJ]

As someone still kind of trying to figure out how Kareem got voted in (I now know how he got voted in, and I didn't know because of a neat selectivity feature this site allows), I have very little issue with the vote. If we aren't going to make it more complex or use a real IRV, I'm OK w what's been happening here.

The issue, as Doc has said, is people not understanding when to switch and when to stick to their guns. It's confusing because the panel is small and we don't have anything close to majorities, we have pluralities. I could have switched this last round so my vote would "count," but I'm never going to switch a vote I don't feel passionately about. Meanwhile, I left, came back, and my vote counted. Big time. In general, if...

-my guy has 1 or 2 votes, it's the 11th hour, there are two major contenders. One I have next, the other I have 10 spots away. Switching makes sense here (this is exercising my pseudo instant runoff vote.)
-my guy has 1 or 2 votes, it's the 11th hour (or not), there are three contenders, none of whom I have separated by much of anything. I want my vote to "count" but I don't see a reason to change my original vote here bc what exactly will it accomplish? How would this be a pseudo runoff -- I have no strong opinion and I don't really "know" who to vote for because another change or two might change the playing field again.

So right now I'm not seeing the need for many systemic changes (especially nominations again -- what's the point in those again?) as long as people don't over think the "runoff" part of their vote.

Some good stuff there. A couple of thoughts relating to the above:

1. I think it's clear at this point that there are going to be ranking projects we simply can't do with the voting system we currently have. I've avoided using IRV because I know of the implementation difficulties with it (and no, I'm still not going to do it this time even if people beg), but a correctly used IRV would absolutely solve this problem.

2. What's really frustrating to me is when I see people implementing strategies that are sub-optimal no matter how you look at it. Game Theory-wise, there are simply going to be times where something doesn't go well because individuals benefit from using strategy that hurts the group.

In my experience though, problems like the one we are talking about fall into that dark ravine where people are tempted into a strategy that doesn't actually benefit anyone because the micro-optimization that occurs is temporal in nature. At the time the person applies the strategy, it shifts the results in a direction they like, but taken over the long term it has a tendency to boomerang back at them.

I feel like if people are a little more aware, we can just make things better all around.

3. There are times I really hate being both a project runner and a voter. I'm not willing to sacrifice my vote, but man was it nice when beast was running things because I didn't have to be super-concerned with people thinking I was biasing the results with the authority I had running things, either on purpose or subconsciously.

Not that anyone has leveled that at me here, but I'm totally paranoid about it. I didn't want to be in the situation where I brought this up while people were strategizing against my choice, and I really didn't want it to happen while some poster was throwing out general allegations of RealGM-bias ("KG homers!").

Suffice to say, if people are feeling uncomfortable with me being in the LeBron camp at the moment, feel free to PM me.

[drza]

It's not that I don't see the trend that this is happening...it's more that I don't see the issue with it. There was about a 6-month lead-up to this project when people were making all types of suggestions about the way to do this. Ultimately the current approach was chosen, with warts known. As such, I don't see what the point of continuing to harp on things that might or might not be ideal with the approach.

Because whether we have nominations or not, whether we have anonymous voting after discussion or not, there will still be warts. One of the issues that I didn't love about the top-100 project last year was the exact opposite side of the coin of what you're discussing here...players getting forced through by a vocal minority. The biggest example I remember was Paul Pierce, who had about 3 strong supporters that IMO brought him up way too early, and because he kept getting discussed and kept getting votes thread after thread it eventually pushed him through before I likely would have even nominated him.

In this project, the same thing happened to an extent with Wilt, as someone complained that Wilt was getting serious discussion in thread one but hadn't even been voted in by thread three. And I thought the response to that complaint was right on...that just because a few folks had Wilt that high didn't necessarily mean that Wilt was even top-5 on others ballots. And that's true.

And the same thing is happening with LeBron now. From one side you guys think that folks "voting against" LeBron might make the list come out wrong...but I kind of side with Mufasa on this one...all of the top peaks are so close, that if it comes down to choosing one of about a group of 5 that might be equally as worthy but that you feel strongly is ahead of a different player, then I have no issue at all in "voting against" the player in that scenario. To address El Gee's point from the opposite side, in this instance a vote against LeBron might be a much more accurate reflection of the main point of difference than a vote for one of the other candidates.

But again...I take all of these as givens based upon the approach we took. If we don't like this approach this time through, then I think we change it for the NEXT project. I'd much rather be spending this time and energy discussing the players than the voting method, by this point.

[JordansBulls]

May be too much to monitor as well but what about assigning a maximum number of times you can switch your vote throughout the project, re: 3 times or something along those lines?

Does that really help the project though? Because then if you can't switch your vote then everyone will have a vote coming in and won't ever change there opinion.

[Dr Positivity]

Yes, because it's incredibly meaningful to know that a team was a 0 SRS team for 40 games and a 5 SRS team for another 40 games by adding a player. I don't know how this isn't relevant information to someone. Of course, this is exactly why I post this information -- because people rarely ever know it and it's useful.

You have to judge the information based on the sample, and you have to weigh the information based on variance in performance (once you get out near 20 games this becomes small). You citing Rerisen's "theory" about teams adjusting has little evidence to support it (why wouldn't teams just switch up their strategies constantly then??), and the idea of teams over-exerting themselves also doesn't have much evidence for the average team because some fall apart without a player and some don't. It's just selective memory. Your point about an error of +/- 2 rendering the data useless is also strange given (a) the error rates of APM/RAPM data and (2) error rates are based on confidence intervals which still have a "most likely" value.

Either way, it seems crazy to me to NOT want to know that information. It's like saying "don't tell me the shooting percentages of teams because they aren't 100% indicative of anything."

Well, you said the right word: It's information. It's information in the same way ppg/apg/rpg stats are and raw wins/losses are, and like PER and WS. The question we have to ask is whether it's more valid information than consulting any of those stats. Many members of this project seem to think it is.

Just using PER as a comparison: Despite it probably coorelating with how good a player is better than any stat we have (sorry APM guys), it's useless in this project and any close player comparison for this reason - PER has an assumed margin of error that removes its value with any "close" comparison. PER is excellent at showing us via numbers that 2012 Dirk Nowitzki and Kevin Love are superstars while Michael Beasley and OJ Mayo blow. It provides no value in the area of helping determine who's better between 2012 Love and Dirk or Beasley vs Mayo, it's not trustworthy enough and isn't supposed to have that pinpoint precision - it's supposed to merely separates the guys in the 20s from the the mid teens, rather than say "Player with 25 PER > player with 23.5 PER"

And that's kind of the way I feel about the injury +/-. I should rephrase, I don't find it useless - I do think Dantley's terrible scores was useful information, because his team improving without him is so out of line with what happens when real star players get injured, that it's safe to say something was going wrong there. Where I don't think it means anything is when the scores are anywhere close. Unless the difference in the scores between eg. Jordan, Shaq, Bird, Magic, Duncan, Hakeem, Kareem, Lebron are massive, they're not going to mean anything to me. I don't know what your Bird/Magic scores are off the top of my head, but say Bird scores as a +9 and Magic a +7. That's just not a big enough gap for me to say it means anything. Dantley's score is important because he's supposed to be a great player and he ranks as a bad player. Bird, Magic, Shaq, etc. all rank as great players, just some more great than others, and that's a far less meaningful conclusion, very similar to how the gap between two players who's PER indicates they are great, is much less important than the gap between a player PER indicates vs is great vs one that it ranks as mediocre. For all the reasons I listed in the previous thread, it's a selection of information that's going to have a clear margin of error - with the issue being that the outputs can hardly survive any margin of error. Bird +9 vs Dantley -2 is likely a bigger gap than the margin of error, it's safe to say Bird being better than Dantley is responsible for it. But we don't need to consult stats to know Bird is better than Dantley, we need it for an undecided comparison like Bird vs Magic. Bird +9 vs Magic +7 meaning anything means the margin has to be small, if there's a reasonable chance it's 3 pts off in either direction, these conclusions are in play: Bird is WAY better than Magic (12 vs 4), Bird is a little better than Magic (9 vs 7), Magic is better than Bird (9 vs 7), Magic is a lot better than Bird (10 vs 6). If it's 4 pts difference then anything betwee Bird 13 Magic 3 and Magic 11 Bird 5, is in play. So relying on the numbers is guessing that the gap comes from Bird being better and not natural variance. And if we're guessing that the gap is deserved, the situation starts to resemble one where someone is saying 87 Magic is better than 86 Bird because of his higher PER or that Bird is better because he had a higher combined ppg/rpg/apg. The statistical advantage may come from the player being better, or it might not, it's too much of a guess to determine whether it's indicative of a difference in the caliber of play to rely on it

As for your 40/40 comparison. Situations where a player is traded like that or misses that many games do stick out to me as useful information. But we've only really had one player voted on so far who has an example of a season or trade creating a split that large in a season, and that's Wilt. The thing is, it was Wilt's other seasons - 65 and 69, NOT the 67 season we were voting on, and in this particular case we knew Wilt 67 and 68 played a different style of play than 65 or 69. So I think the Wilt didn't improve his teams information is very important to ranking him on the ATL, but in the context of this project ranking peaks, the difference in the way he was used in 67 means the values didn't hold a lot of weight to me.

[ElGee]

I don't know what your Bird/Magic scores are off the top of my head, but say Bird scores as a +9 and Magic a +7. That's just not a big enough gap for me to say it means anything. Dantley's score is important because he's supposed to be a great player and he ranks as a bad player. Bird, Magic, Shaq, etc. all rank as great players, just some more great than others, and that's a far less meaningful conclusion, very similar to how the gap between two players who's PER indicates they are great, is much less important than the gap between a player PER indicates vs is great vs one that it ranks as mediocre.

So this is worth addressing because I often feel data is misunderstood, and while I try to add context to it that doesn't always happen. There are two important elements for posting all this +/- data:

(1) It helps determine player value
(2) People don't know the information!

The second on is why I go out of my way to provide the info. PER is derived from a box -- everyone in this project and probably everyone reading knows the "scoring production" of these players and all their teammates. People also know the team SRS results. Most people have no idea how a team performed over 20 games without someone or even in 72 games with a player in question (which seems MORE relevant, right off the bat, than the final team results).

I don't think people have a good grasp for lineup continuity and how much it matters. I don't think people have a good grasp for how much 4-factors type stuff matters versus a random collection of talent (I can put together a team of MVP's in 2 seconds that would fail to make the playoffs).

Put together, if we can look at useful sample sizes, especially in multiple contexts, we can start to get some relevant info. As you said, it's not precise, but look what the story can tell us just taking the example of Magic and Bird. It tells us, to me, that (1) the Lakers were a stronger team around Magic, ON OFFENSE, than people probably give them credit for. Do you think people had any idea about this or what Scott/Worthy/Coop looked like with Magic? This may not be something that provides a precise data point, but IMO nothing really does. It's yet another imprecise piece of information to be used corroborating evidence. With Bird, OTOH, we see consistent patterns in stuff like rebounding impact, team ast%, team ORTG, his defensive impact, etc. These again aren't super precise but they really help answer valuable questions.

And since most people don't know this information, it seems pretty darn relevant. (I understand what you're saying about differentiating peak seasons...but in a lot of cases the peak season isn't some giant outlier, so surrounding information is helpful to put the "goodness" of the peak year into perspective.)

[ardee]

As for your 40/40 comparison. Situations where a player is traded like that or misses that many games do stick out to me as useful information. But we've only really had one player voted on so far who has an example of a season or trade creating a split that large in a season, and that's Wilt. The thing is, it was Wilt's other seasons - 65 and 69, NOT the 67 season we were voting on, and in this particular case we knew Wilt 67 and 68 played a different style of play than 65 or 69. So I think the Wilt didn't improve his teams information is very important to ranking him on the ATL, but in the context of this project ranking peaks, the difference in the way he was used in 67 means the values didn't hold a lot of weight to me.

You just became, in my eyes, the best poster on RealGM.

[ElGee]

A few things looking forward because the pace will pick back up once the Sacred Peak guys go...

-I'm leaning toward David Robinson 14th. That may surprise people, but he's a monster defensively and I think his offense looks better in a secondary role (which is a good thing here). The other guy I can see really arguing over Robinson right now is Wade, and I think his peak may be...2011!? West, Oscar and Barkley would be the other contenders there.

-I have a group of 11 guys after the Sacreds before I hit Dirk.

-I have Scottie Pipen in that group of 12 guys. This might seem bizarre, but I've gone over it again and again, and Pippen's an ultra-portable player with big-man like impact on D and great facilitation/secondary presence on offense. Again, this is a good thing, making him sort of a David Robinson Lite...I'm not opposed to him being at the back of this pack, but right now I don't see it.

-Current guys in the group: Paul, Howard and Nash .